Month: May 2016

Chicago’s Vintage Garage is a monthly all-vintage flea market, held in a parking garage in the Uptown neighborhood through the warm months. Over a hundred vendors of vintage clothing, appliances, housewares, and various sundries gather, set up their wares, and sell to the vintage loving hordes. And for some reason, I had never gone. I always mean to go, then end up skipping it. Not this year!

Each month has a different theme, and May’s was Mid-Century Modern. Clearly, this requires a mid-century outfit. So I assembled one. It ended up being completely covered by my coat. It was so cold! While 50 degrees certainly isn’t the worst, inside a concrete parking garage it was much colder. I felt bad for the vendors. On the plus side, the people selling coats and sweaters probably had a great day.

This is the outfit I came up with. This is also the first time I got up the gumption to wear cigarette pants out in public. I think the whole thing is rather sweater girl and cute.

To take a turn on Game of Thrones: Summer is coming.

There are a lot of things I love about summer, like trips to the beach, working in my garden, not shivering while waiting for the bus, etc. However, I have the heat tolerance of a popsicle. Being excessively warm transforms me from a reasonable person into an angry, wilted mess. A hot sunny day often gets my chronic conditions a-flaring, and let’s not even talk about how easily I sunburn.

If it’s over 80 degrees, it’s pretty much a given that I have the vapors.

These various things being the case, it is not surprising that I am not keen to turn on my oven in the heat of summer. However, I’ve been baking a lot of my own bread lately, and I’d like to continue to do so. Bread baking keeps the oven going at 350-400 degrees for about an hour. The natural conclusion is to buy bread. OR bake it at four in the morning. OR bake it all now.

Enter the freezer, my hero. I’m baking loaves of bread, wrapping them up in foil, and filing them away for summer time.

Food storage has been an issue for humans for a long, long time. It’s why we learned to dry, pickle, bake, boil, and roast. It’s why we figured out canning, and refrigeration, and flash freezing. Having a ready supply of food has meant the difference between survival and death for most of history.

In more recent, vintage-y times, food storage was a way to be thrifty and prepared. Homemakers stored the bounty of their summer gardens for winter, so they didn’t have to rely on store bought products. During World War II, American homemakers were encouraged to grow and can food, so that factory produced stuff could go to the troops and people who couldn’t preserve their own food. This is why victory gardens were such a big thing, and people could get extra sugar rations for canning.

My own reasons for preparing food are a mix of thrift, preference, and a desire to shake my puny fist at our corporate food system. But since I don’t have a summer kitchen, or a root cellar, or basement, or any of the many appealing options for storage that have seen housewives through the ages, I will first have to make space.